The Countdown Clock on Brexit

Theresa May this week at the annual Conservative Party conference in England.CreditCreditOli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The British prime minister’s announcement on Sunday that Britain will begin formal negotiations on withdrawing from the European Union by the end of March effectively started a countdown that must end in the spring of 2019. The prompt plunge of the British currency to a 31-year low against the dollar provided a far louder response than the misguided cheers of her fellow Conservative Party members.

The prime minister, Theresa May, put the best face on the decision, declaring that Britain would once again become a “fully independent, sovereign country,” while her insouciant foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, repeated his foolish quip that Britain’s policy was “having our cake and eating it.” Yet the reality is that Britain has a lot to lose in leaving the union, and that putting a two-year limit on the negotiations further weakens an already shaky hand.

It may well be that Mrs. May had little choice but to set a date for formally invoking Article 50 of a European Union treaty, which sets the rules for withdrawing, after the British voted to opt out in a referendum in June. Her government may have preferred to informally sound out Europeans on arrangements that would let Britain stay in the common European market while ending free entry for other Europeans, the main demand of the “Leave” voters. But the other 27 members of the union, led by France and Germany, made clear they had no interest in “prenegotiations” or any special deal for London. At the same time, hard-core Euroskeptics demanded that Mrs. May get moving on Brexit.

Even with good intentions on all sides, two years is very little time for the complex process of disentangling Britain from the bloc’s rules and procedures, especially since that also entails negotiating new trade agreements with the bloc itself and with all the countries that have trade deals with the European Union.

If the talks run out of time or collapse in acrimony, Britain could simply be thrown out of the union, facing tariffs on its manufactured goods and losing the “passporting” rights for British financial services to operate throughout the bloc.

That would be a far greater blow to Britain than to the European Union. Britain is dependent on the union market for 45 percent of its exports, while only 16 percent of the union’s exports are to Britain, and the British financial industry, which serves the European market, accounts for 10 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product.

No doubt the remaining 27 countries would prefer a harmonious divorce with minimal disruption to their economies, and perhaps that is what will happen. But with nationalist and populist parties on the rise in many European countries, and with the union facing economic and social challenges, the bloc’s leaders are rightly determined to demonstrate that no member can be allowed to pick and choose among the “four freedoms” to which the union is committed — freedom of goods, services, capital and people — and that opting out carries a serious penalty.